The most important condition for the successful implementation of the widely discussed strategy of national development up to 2020 is the correct positioning of Russia in world affairs. This can create the best possible preconditions for
internal development and for the realization of national interests in key regions of the planet.

The current discussion of the geopolitical dimension of Plan-2020 seems quite appropriate. I would like to take the liberty of suggesting some of the principles of Russia's foreign policy priorities. The main one is virtually unavoidable: We will have to act as an independent power center in the near future. As our presidents, the current one and the president-elect, correctly pointed out, Russia is one of the few countries on our planet that is capable of pursuing an independent foreign policy. We simply have no one to surrender our sovereignty to, even if we suddenly were to wish to do this. The European countries happily sacrificed their sovereignty for the sake of the European Union and NATO, but no one wants us there: We are too big and too Russian. By the same token, there is no need for Russia to be there: The European Union is now largely a zone of retarded development because of the excessive regulation of the European economy (where in the European Union will you find a flat tax of 13 percent?), and it would be better for us not to restrict our freedom in military policy by joining the North Atlantic bloc. In the East, there simply is nowhere to surrender sovereignty, and the organizations to which Russia does belong -- the CIS, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and so forth -- have not even come close to establishing any consequential supranational integrated structures to take over the powers of national governments.

Russia will continue to be an independent power center with its own civilization -- based on Eastern Christianity. (In this context, we have to agree with the main architects of the theory of civilizations -- Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington). The United States, the European Union as a whole, China, India, and possibly Japan and Brazil are centers of this type or are striving to become centers of this type. Is Russia strong enough, however, to play a relatively independent role in world affairs? I think it is.

According to the estimates of respected international and national experts, it would take a serious run of bad luck to keep Russia from becoming the fifth-ranking economy in the world in the next decade (now it is in seventh or eighth place). We will remain a major state because of our UN Security Council membership and a leading energy, nuclear, space, and resource country, which has made a tremendous contribution to the development of the entire human race in the past millennium. The modernization envisaged in Plan-2020 should also enable us to climb up to the proper level of a world power in terms of
socioeconomic parameters. Russia in 2020 certainly will not be a superpower, but it will be one of the great powers.

This status presupposes full-fledged membership in organizations serving as the brain and the control center of today's world. In this context, we would not benefit from the isolation or marginalization of Russia in the global political environment, which is the current goal of several Western politicians (particularly John McCain), who want to exclude us from G8 and create a
global Western system, with NATO as its basis, as an alternative system founded on the UN Charter and international law. One of the possible preconditions for this marginalization is the fact that the power centers in today's world are competing for nonrenewable sources of energy, and all of the main centers (with the exception of Russia) are importers of these resources. Our
country's interests would be served by progress in creating the future global control center based on the United Nations, the institutionalization of G8, and its augmentation with the new economic giants -- China, India, and Brazil.

Above all, democratic principles presuppose the primacy of law, and this certainly includes the primacy of international law. Democracy will continue to develop in the Russian Federation not because someone on the outside is insisting on it, but because this is necessary and beneficial for us. No one will decide Russia's future for it, and anyone wishing to maintain normal relations with us should be advised not to make any attempts to do this.

One of the most noteworthy and dangerous trends in today's world is the remilitarization of international relations. After the real reduction of military expenditures in the 1990s, they are rising quickly again. Today the United States, which accounts for 57 percent of all of the defense spending in the world, is spending 25 times as much as Russia, and NATO is spending 40
times as much as Russia. For the first time in its history, the United States is fighting two major wars at once (although without any particular success). The arms control system that took so much effort to establish in the last decades of the 20th century is in danger of falling apart. I agree completely with Vladimir Putin: "Under these conditions, it is important to stay firm and to practice restraint, never allowing ourselves to be drawn into wasteful confrontations." Under normal conditions, our defense spending should not exceed 3 percent of our rapidly growing GDP.

The rule of adequate security should lie at the basis of our defense policy -- guaranteeing the ability of the Armed Forces to repulse any type of internal or external threat. Priority must be assigned to qualitative parameters, and the army must be increasingly professional, mobile, high-tech, motivated, based on the ideals of honor and the best Russian army traditions, and free of corruption and disgraceful hazing practices. At a time of global remilitarization, we must maintain our nuclear-missile component at a level securing the assured deterrence of any aggressor and breaking through any ballistic missile defense system. We also must surmount the obvious gap in such priority fields of military organizational development as the development of our own ABM system, aerospace capabilities, and the improvement of combat command, control, and communications systems and electronic and radar reconnaissance.

While we are building up our "tough strength," we must not under any circumstances neglect our "gentle strength" -- the ability to influence the rest of the world with our ideological potential, our example, our moral leadership, our information, and the possibilities of our non-governmental organizations. The foreign policy establishment in the United States includes more than 15,000 non-commercial organizations with a combined budget in the billions. We have no more than 50, and only 10 at the most have enough money to do their best work.

This is the area in which we have been most lacking to date. Our geostrategy-2020 must also include a geographic hierarchy of foreign policy priorities, but this will have to be discussed at some other time.